Flybarless & pilotless

The answer is yes. She hovers autonomously without a flybar.

The answer is no. Did not get any pictures. The window between storms is too short to get any meaningful flight times & she drifts around significantly in the light gusts. With light drizzle, good chances of a strong gust & very high repair costs, not confident enough to swap controls for camera.

Had another complete tail rotor failure in which the belt drive autonomously built up slack since installation. Need 2 keep on top of the slack & abort if tail rotor begins drifting. 1 main shaft gone.

The T-Sux 450 is sucking money faster than our boss's subprime mortgage. February so far:


$24.96 2 Belts
$25.28 Ball link tool
$18.36 plastic blades & bolts
$40.18 CF blades
$22.87 1 Belt, main shaft & bolts
--------
$131.65


With such a blood sucking, fragile copter, VicaGlider may be unaffordable.

Put the yaw damping on the lowpass filter and got no difference. Still a bit of a wag. Expanding the flybarless envelope, it's more like attitude hold than full manual. Hovering in ground effect is rock solid. Rapid descents R almost hands off.

Americans think she's a UFO. Indians think she's just a flybarless T-Rex 450 using ADXRS150 gyros & very tight PID loops.

Got the PIC up to 85 IMU updates without radio signal & 90 IMU updates with radio signal. Peculiar loss of clockcycles without radio. No IMU recalibration was necessary.

In the current configuration the PWM duty cycle goes from 4000 - 24000. The maximum rate damping offset is 32767 * 32 / 256 = 4096

If a servo is full over & opposing angular velocity saturates the gyros, she could overflow, but that situation is already lethal. With a human pilot, rate damping always opposes servo deflection instead of adding to it. In a tail rotor failure, overflow could happen, however.

There aren't enough clockcycles to clamp feedback. The tail rotor fails all the time.